If you’ve been on Facebook in the past week, you’ve probably noticed that things look a little different.
Instead of the classic Like button, you can now choose between 6 different emoji-like Reactions: Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry.
Reactions were rolled out globally on Wednesday, February 24th and are already making a splash on Facebook.
The release of Reactions comes after months of testing and some refinement.
Originally, for example, Reactions were going to include a Yay option. This was the least used button in the testing phase, however, so Facebook decided to leave it out.
The Love button, on the other hand, has proved extremely popular.
Facebook strove to choose emotions that are universal so they’ll work all around the world. The Reactions and their emoji representations are designed to work for everyone.
The new Reactions are also simple to use.
If you want to like a post, you can simply click the Like button just as you always used to.
If you want to use a different Reaction, you hover over the Like button. On mobile, hold down on the Like button, and the row of Reactions will pop up.
You can then choose the Reaction that best fits your response. Now, if a friend shares sad news about a sick family member, for example, you can react with the Sad button or show empathy with the Love button.
Each post shows a breakdown of how many people have reacted in each way. When people respond to your post, you’ll now receive a notification that someone has reacted. You can then go to your post to see more details on what the different reactions are.
For marketers, Reactions seems to be a positive change. You can still view analytics on the total number of reactions, making it easy to continue evaluating engagement in the same way.
However, you can also look at the breakdown of different reactions. This means you can get more insight into how people are emotionally responding to your post.
This means greater insight into the minds (or hearts) of your followers. How you use this information is up to you, but it may help you to mold your content for better engagement.
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Written by content manager Meghan Woolley
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